If an animal is slaughtered in a commercial slaughtering house the skinning process involves either removing the skin intact or the animal is slaughtered and the skin is then removed. When a hunter kills an animal during the hunting season, he must carry or drag the animal to a proper slaughtering place or slaughter the animal in the wild where the animal was felled. Transporting the felled animal to a slaughtering house can be a time consuming and strenuous operation.
Generally, the outside or fur layer of the skin is not allowed to have contact with the inside flesh layer, or meat of the animal. If the outside skin of the animal comes in contact with the meat portion of the animal, contamination of the meat may result due to parasites or other contaminates found on animals in the wild.
In the past, attempts have been made to provide the hunter with an apparatus to remove the skin from an animal felled in the wild. One such attempt is U.S. Pat. No. 5,211,601 issued to Cope on May 18, 1993. The Cope patent discloses placing the carcass of the animal in proximity to a footed pole or member that has an overhead winch. A predetermined portion of the carcass's skin is secured to the footed portion of the apparatus and the hind legs are attached to the winch. The winch is activated and the skin is removed from the animal. While this apparatus may skin selective sizes of animals, it does not lend itself to skinning all types and sizes of animals. For example, if an animal's girth is less than the distance between the footed portions of the apparatus, a larger portion of the skin has to be peeled from the meat to reach and be secured to the footed portion. This pre-skinning adds to the risk of contaminating the meat of the animal. Portability of such an apparatus is limited. If the apparatus is disassembled, the subassemblies of the apparatus must be retained or bundled in some manner to be transported in bulk. The Cope patent subassemblies do not provide any structure to retain the apparatus after disassembly or means for easily transporting the apparatus once disassembled.
Another attempt to provide the hunter with an apparatus to remove the skin from an animal felled in the wild is U.S. Pat. No. 5,336,124 issued to Garside on Aug. 9, 1994. The Garside patent discloses a skinning apparatus that secures the antlers of the carcass to a tree and a portion of the skin of the animal is secured to a vehicle via a skin removal tool. The vehicle then moves in a direction opposite from the tree and the skin is removed from the carcass.
The skin removal tool is positioned at the nap or base of the neck of the carcass with a selected portion of the carcass's skin wedged in one end of the tool. The other end of the tool is secured to the vehicle. Tension is applied to the skin removal tool by the forward movement of the vehicle. The more tension applied by the vehicle the tighter the tool grasps the selected portion of skin. The skin removal tool has pointed or sharpened portions that engage the skin. Presumably, this is to hold the skin in place while the vehicle applies tension to the skin removal tool. This feature of the Garside patent tears or rips the skin in such a way as to cause the skin removal tool to lose its grip on the skin when tension is applied.
It would be desirable to have a winch operated transportable carcass skinning apparatus. The carcass skinning apparatus could be disassembled and stored as a unitary structure i.e., each subassembly would clamp or be retained by an associated subassembly structure. The unitary structure would then be transported to a slaughtering site or location and then be quickly reassembled for skinning the carcass. The carcass skinning apparatus would be selectively adjusted to the size of the animal to be skinned.